Book Review: Ugliness: A Cultural History (Gretchen E. Henderson)Reviewed by Michael NorthenFollowers of Gretchen Henderson's work know that she is unique in the world of disability literature. In La Gallerie de Defomitie, she converted an online house of referential doors into the adult equivalent of a create your own story book. In Of Marvelous Things Heard, she wedded an Aristotelian quote to literary thoughts on music and philosophy. In The House Enters the Street she creates a narrative of intertwined family stories with shifting perspectives. Her readers probably have been wondering what she would do next. The answer is Ugliness: A Cultural History . Like all of its predecessors , Ugliness shares in a spirit of eclecticism, but it may be Henderson's most structurally straightforward book to date. It is divided into four parts: (1) "Ugly Ones" focuses on individual portraits of Ugliness; (2) "Ugly Groups" looks at the way the concept of Ugliness is used to marginalize certain groups of people; (3) "Ugly Senses" hones in more on concerns specific to disabled bodies; and (4) the epilogue, "Ugly Us" considers the concept of Ugliness within the context of writing. In each of these sections, the author leads off with a mini-introduction that probes the origins of the particular concept of Ugliness being explored in that section. In describing the purpose of her book Henderson writes, "I have been less concerned with re-defining Ugliness in absolute terms than with following the gesture of Ugliness through its unruly history to locate patterns of cultural behavior and representations where its meaning solidifies and shifts." Before proceeding to the book proper, Henderson includes a lengthy formal introduction that sets the stage for her work and accomplishes several things in addition to merely previewing the chapters. She makes it clear that she is not proposing a new definition of Ugliness or that what is considered ugly should be viewed as beautiful. Instead, the author posits that while beauty is bound up in the physical it is also conceptual and that concepts of beauty and Ugliness operate like binary stairs, each drawing off of the other and blurring lines. Henderson also underscores the basic visual nature of beauty by including a variety of images: Lewis Carrol's Griffin, Hans Christian Andrson's "The Ugly Woman, a paint of "The Ugly Face Club," an anatomical etching comparing the head of an ox and the head of an ox-like man, and a an advertisement for Juliana Pastrana. Even more than words, such images force readers to examine their own conceptions. The first section "Ugly Ones: Uncomfortable Anomalies" presents a series of portraits of both mythogical and historical individuals whose bodies deviated from social or cultural norms. Included in this lineup are Polyphemus, Dame Ragnall, William Hay and Juliana Pastrana. While such a parade of non-typical bodies could be viewed as a literary excuse for the equivalent of Barnum and Bailey gawking, Henderson's interrogation into the reason that each of the individuals is considered aberrant is the real meat of the section and what ties it all together. The second section of the book shifts from bias against particular individuals to characterizing whole peoples and the various mechanisms by which it was done. As Henderson points out, the term monster originally served to characterize an individual and Greek mythology (as well as the religions of other peoples) were frequently populated with monsters. Using the example of Poyphemus, who was actually monstrous among his own people, Henderson points out how a characteristic of one person can shift to a whole race of people. In the case of the Cyclops, it was the single eye – a characteristic of all Cyclops – that became imbued with the concept of monstrous as a result of their relationship with Polyphemus. Henderson makes the point that, in the Greek culture at least, a shift occurred from viewing inhabitants in distant lands in mythological terms to characterizing actual cultures in terms of the way that they differed physically from themselves. The story that the Greek word for barbarian was onomatopoetic for their impression of the speech of cultures whom they could not understand is well traveled. It is one in which difference and outsider began to take on negative connotations. (A modern case in point is the way in which many Americans today use the word "foreigner" as an implicitly pejorative term.) Within this discussion of groups Henderson follows several more or less sequential threads in the metamorphosis of Ugliness when applied to groups. These move through signifying in which physical characteristics are stand-ins for moral status, to colonial considerations where differences are read as signs of inferiority that justifies subjugation and slavery, to the issues of Ugliness caused to military involved in war, to a series of curious laws enacted in the United States that came to be known as "The Ugly Laws." The third section of the book's, subtitled "Transgressing Perceived Borders" focuses on the senses. Henderson states, "I am interested in how Ugliness interrupts perceptions and reworks space between subject and object." This is a section that catalogues objects and experiences that might be considered ugly in relationship to the particular sense that perceives it, and many of the examples are interesting. Nevertheless, it is probably the books least accomplished section and could probably be reasonably summed up in Henderson's quote from Harriet McBride Johnson, "It's not that I'm ugly, it is more that people don't know how to look at me." As McBride's comment implies, when taken literally, Ugliness is primarily a visual category. Logically, therefore, it is sight that Henderson begins with, focusing particularly upon representations in visual media such as painting and photography. Next, She look at sound, and, as music is generally considered beautiful, describes innovations that veer away from what is traditionally thought of as beautiful in music. Her examples sketch a continuing historical divergence moving from the Mixolydian scale in classical Greece to Schoenberg's twelve tone scale to Cage's experiments where the lines between what is ordinarily considered noise and music are blurred. She also pulls in the interesting example of McCarthyites of the 1950's labeling rock and roll ugly. Ugly smells range from public toilets to sex. They tends to involve bodily fluids as well as decomposition, so while smell is one of the least investigated senses, it is significant to disability studies in as much as fear of decay, death and the realities of the processes of the body are major themes within that field. By the time she comes to touch, Henderson is really working to stretch a visual metaphor to cover a non-visual experience. She comes up with haggis, black pudding, Filipino balut and Vegemite. The book's Epilogue, for from being a coda, is arguably the most interesting feature of the book. In it, Henderson asks the question: can writing be ugly? If so, how does Ugliness manifests itself in content and form. Henderson makes it clear that she is not talking about writing that is abusive or centered on unsavory topics. Neither is she referring to writing that is sloppily written or in which the text is filled with underlining or marginalia. One candidate for ugly writing is that which is found in the upper eschalons of academia. The structure of all of Hendersons's previous books, especially The House Enters the Street, have been informed by a back ground in music, and this previous experience carries over into Ugliness as well. One of the true delights of reading Ugliness is its unstated ability to assert that academic or scholarly writing need not be "ugly writing." There seem to be an assumption in disability studies that in order for writing to be scholarly it also needs to be inpenetrable – a rather odd assumption since a leitmotif of disability studies is accessibility. Perhaps this is because being a rather new field, it is a bit insecure, but Henderson's latest book proves that this need not be. It would take a true curmudgeon, given the extensive bibliography, Henderson's polymathic ability to continually pull in references, and her over all awareness of disability themes, to claim that Ugliness does not qualify as literary scholarship, but Henderson's ability to weave themes and make connections through recurrence, association and suggestion feels more like a symphonic work than something bound for the archives. The creativity and intellectual playfulness that characterized Henderson's other books are present once again in Ugliness: A Cultural History. it is hard to imagine that anyone with a curious mind will not feel their synapses firing as they read through its pages, but those involved in disability studies in particular will benefit from seeing that scholarship does not have to be stodgy. Readers who have been waiting to see what Henderson would do next will not be disappointed.
Title: Ugliness: A Cultural History
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